Melody's Escape

Changed the look of light orbs. The new look should hopefully alleviate the "motion-blur" feeling induced by LCD monitors with high latency, as they have less contrast than the old ones and softer borders.

Light orbs explosion in Running intensity now pack a bit more punch.

The new in-game sounds now play at the same volume regardless of the movement mode intensity.

Fixed an issue with track caching resulting in difficulty mix-ups if a song had been played with "Custom" difficulty settings.

The Steam Workshop items checking/downloading screen now only happens once per session, so you can quickly switch skins without waiting if you have a lot of subscriptions. Using the "Go to the Steam Workshop" in-game menu will reset that state and make it check again the next time you visit the "Customize Appearance" menu.

Performance Changes (mostly targeted at lower-end GPUs)

Anti-Aliasing on Windows is now slightly faster and toggling the option on/off doesn't require to restart the game anymore.

Modified "low FPS" detection (below 50FPS) to interrupt the game and show a warning screen allowing the player to automatically lower graphics quality to gain performance (as the obstacle timing/hitbox suffers when performances are poor and that has quite a negative impact on the gameplay, delaying button/key inputs).

Added a "Low FPS" warning label below the heart score during a game if the FPS counter is enabled in the options and the FPS is too low.

Added a new system to detect if the GPU drivers launched the game using the integrated GPU on dual-GPUs computers (usually laptops), to suggest to the player to launch the game using the "gaming" GPU instead.

Added a global variable to the .exe targeted at NVidia Optimus laptop, to tell to the driver to use the NVidia GPU instead of the integrated one. If you own an Optimus laptop, I would love feedback on whether or not this feature is working!

All available GPUs detected are now listed in "log.txt" inside the game's installation folder.

Added in-game sound effects (all are optionals and can be disabled!). By default only "errors" sound effects will play, but you can enable them for all obstacle success and hearts in the "Audio" options menu.

Added sound effects and animations for the hearts score animation during the post-track score overview.

Added "TOO LATE" error text for failed obstacles which didn't receive their input in time. Pressing the wrong button will instead display "ERROR" (and play a different sound too), so you can distinguish between timing problems and incorrect input.

The Workshop is now public and visible even if you don't own the game.

Game changes

Added new border decorations for the ground on Running and Flying mode. The reasoning behind this was that the grass was a very high density repeating pattern, scrolling very quickly accross the screen, and it may have an effect on the "motion blur" feeling that some players are experiencing. The new borders are much more streamlined and should feel more easy on the eyes.

Added a "zoom-in" feature, you can now select "120%" as zoom value in the General options menu.

Slightly shifted light orbs' position towards the ground in Jogging and Running sections, so that it's easier to focus on both orbs and obstacles at the same time.

The game will now detect streaks of very low FPS (<30FPS) and suggest at the end of the track to the player to disable Anti-Aliasing or Post-Processing to alievate performances issues.

Added "Favorite Folders" to the bottom of the main folders list. This menu choice automatically extracts and lists all the different folders from your "Favorite" tagged files, allowing easy access to your common music folders.

Added help tooltips to most options items.

Misc changes

New on-disk track caching format, which now stores obstacles and track intensity data directly (and for each difficulty density type) instead of the music audio profile, reducing the size of cache files by a factor of 10. This change greatly speeds up track loading from cache, especially for very long tracks, and solves very rare cases where the cached version had different obstacles than the first "live" analysis, due to floating point rounding issues. All previously cached music files will now need to be re-analysed again.

Added a mod editor/studio. You can now very easilly create your own skins, hairstyles and color themes and edit them all in real-time (Windows only).

Added "slow-mo" jumps in running sections, for very specific occurences where the music's energy drastically drops during a few seconds. Those jumps can be identified on the song preview graph by a blue vertical dashed line (note that they are quite rare and mostly found in electro music)

You can access the new Mod Editor in the game's installation folder, under the name "ModStudio.exe". I will soon write a tutorial on how to use this tool, but it should be quite simple to grasp the basics if you're already familiar with Melody's Escape custom content creation. The main advantages are real time color editing and texture reloading.

Added a "belt" skin element for the character skin (empty on the default skin). This element is drawn above the legs and is tied to the position of the "pelvis" element. You can use it for instance to draw a skirt above the legs

Hairlocks are now drawn above the static sprite of a haircut.

Minor Changes

Added some noise/dithering to the sky's background gradient, so that the gradient horizontal lines are less noticeable and to get a slightly more gritty visual result.

Removed the background gradient in menus screen as it resulted in visible horizontal lines with some color schemes.

The flying mode's backgrounds were slightly offset so that they don't intersect visually with the orbs anymore, for better visibility.

Hair movement now flow more naturally for all animations where Melody rolls (especially with very long hairstyles where it was too stiff before)

Flying mode is now slightly faster and running mode is now slightly slower

Multiple changes to the default color palette

Fixed folders with a dot "." character in their name being shown as playlists in the music selection menu

Fixed scrolling the music list with LB/RB shoulder button (or PgUp/PgDown keys) being able to overflow if the list was small.

Removed the "disable dynamic hair simulation" performance option as its cost was quite minimal compared to its high visual quality impact.

Fixed fullscreen mode issues when restarting the game on Linux

The Mac port is now using universal binaries, which should fix Workshop Skin loading issue that prevented some players from running the game after subscribing to a skin.

Melody's Escape is now available on Linux and Mac, as a native port using FNA/Mono.

Everything should be functional, except for a few issues with fullscreen mode that will be fixed in the next patch, and "drag'n'drop" which isn't working yet.

If you encounter any issues on those platforms, please don't hesitate to post them in the Linux and Mac support thread.
If the mouse isn't responding correctly after switching to fullscreen, you can use the keyboard to navigate the menus.